The Emancipator's Wife (22 page)

Mary delicately buttered one of the beaten biscuits that were Eppy's pride before replying. At home she would have dodged the question, since most of Betsey's questions had some ulterior motive, but in Ninian's eyes—and Elizabeth's peaceful silence—she read only interest in what she actually thought. At length she said, “I hope I'll never be put to the test of falling in love with a man whose ideas differ radically from mine.”

“That would hardly be possible, would it?” asked Frances. Mary and Frances had spent the day—a Saturday, hot with the breathless humidity of high summer—picnicking with Dr. Wallace, Mr. Douglas, and Mercy Levering, in the woods that fringed Sutton's Prairie to the east of town. That huge expanse of empty grassland, rising imperceptibly to a too-close horizon, filled Mary with a kind of panic, and she had been glad for the company of her sister and her friends.

Having watched the matter-of-fact understanding, the peaceful teamwork, of Frances and William Wallace—having seen her sister's obvious happiness with the soft-voiced young doctor—Mary wasn't sure what to answer.
Could
she wholeheartedly love someone whose mind was alien to hers? She had certainly not loved Nate Bodley.

She felt a lump of envy in her chest, and the lump of loneliness that never quite ever went away. She said, “Would you love Dr. Wallace, if his ideas differed from what you believed was right?”

“Of course.” The prompt self-evidentness in her sister's voice told Mary that Frances had never given the matter a thought and hadn't the slightest idea of why Mary hesitated.

“Which I suppose is why,” smiled Elizabeth, “everyone says that women should stay out of politics. In how many households do you think there's really room for
two
politicians?”

By her tone of voice that ended the matter, but Mary persisted. “Next you'll be saying that women shouldn't have an education.”

“Of course not, dear,” said Elizabeth. “I know how you love your books. Just don't let your education interfere with your happiness.”

Mary opened her mouth, and shut it again, overwhelmed with the familiar sense of speaking to people from some unknown land.

In any case the point was a moot one, because much as Mary enjoyed flirting with Stephen Douglas—and he, clearly, with her—she felt in his presence no such stirring of the senses as she'd experienced with Nate Bodley, let alone the delicious and instantaneous raptures occasioned by the heroes of
Belinda
and
Glenarvon.
What she did experience—with more and more frequency as the summer drew on—was an odd sense of desperation.

“Elizabeth is less insistent about it than Betsey,” sighed Mary a few nights after that conversation, as she and Mercy sat on the porch of
Ninian's house watching their escorts for the evening drive off in a rented buggy. Merce had been asked to a lecture on Phrenology at the Mechanics' Institute hall by Josh Speed, a partner in Speed and Bell's Dry Goods—a twinkly-eyed Kentuckian who had the gift of getting along with nearly everyone in town—and Mary had been escorted along by Mr. Shields, a bantam Irish lawyer who quite plainly considered himself God's gift to the female sex. “But she wants to marry me off, too.”

Mary felt a twinge of anger as she said the words—at Elizabeth, at
Betsey, at her father. At the world that was so constituted that an unmarried girl would, when she died, spend Eternity leading apes around Hell.

“They just want you to be happy,” pointed out Mercy, breaking off a spray of the sweet-smelling honeysuckle to twine around her fingers. She spoke a bit diffidently, for in spite of their friendship Mary had lost her temper at her once or twice over trifles, and though they'd made up with tears and apologies, Mercy now tended to pick her words carefully.

“Can't they see I'm happy as I am? Why does a woman need to marry some
man
to be happy?”

Mercy replied, her voice peaceful in the thickening twilight, “I suppose because we can't stay forever in our fathers' houses.” Sitting straight-backed on the rush-bottomed porch chair, she seemed to give off an aura of quiet from her rustling lavender muslin skirts, her smooth fair hair. “Because if we're not part of some household—father's, brother's, brother-in-law's, husband's—we won't be comfortable, and will have to make our livings at some horrid task like sewing or ironing or teaching school. And because without a husband or children of her own, I don't think any woman can truly be happy.”

Mary was silent, thinking of her mother, thin and worn with childbearing. Of Betsey, always pregnant, always angry, more and more often ill and confined to her room...With a flash of insight Mary realized her stepmother felt the same anger she did, at the husband and father who found it so easy to be away for weeks at a time with the Legislature.

“Elizabeth sees Mr. Speed, or Mr. Shields, and sees they'll be rich, and have nice homes, and that as Mrs. Shields you'll never want for nice dresses or a carriage.”

“As if that mattered!” retorted Mary. “I should rather marry a poor man whom I loved, a man who is going someplace—even a Yankee—than an old rich one with all his fortune secure. I've told Elizabeth that.”

“And I think Elizabeth doesn't see why you can't love a wealthy man as easily as a poor one,” responded Mercy. “Or why you can't love Mr. Douglas, who is certainly going someplace. He's used his position as registrar to buy up some of the choicest property in the state, Mr. Speed tells me, up near Chicago....”

“Chicago?” exclaimed Mary, startled. “You mean that village where the lumber boats come in?”

“Mr. Speed said Chicago will be a major city one day, and that Mr. Douglas will end as a very rich man.”

Mary sniffed, amused. “If I paid ten cents for one town lot in every village someone told me was going to be a major city one day, I'd be bankrupt tomorrow. And Ninian doesn't trust Mr. Douglas.” She hesitated, turning her fan over in her hands. “To tell you the truth I don't either, after the way he went on about Mr. Sampson's Ghost.”

Sampson's Ghost was the pseudonym used by a writer of letters to the
Sangamo Journal
during a local campaign for probate justice that had been closely followed by every inhabitant of the House on the Hill. The Democratic candidate, a General Adams, lived on land deeded to him by the deceased Mr. Sampson; the letter-writing Ghost offered proof that not only had Adams forged the deed to Mr. Sampson's land, he had earlier forged a judgment to gain title to the land of a man named Anderson, robbing Anderson's widow and son. The letters were entertaining, written with a wry satiric humor that had most of the town laughing. Stephen Douglas had bristled when Mary had laughed at them, however, and had defended Adams hotly.

“A fool can write whatever he likes to the papers, and get another fool to print it.” Douglas, Mary had learned already, had little use for the editor of the
Journal,
the bespectacled and cheerful Simeon Francis. Then he had added—fatally, if he'd ever had any intention of winning Mary's hand—“What does a pretty girl like you need to go reading that farrago for, anyway?”

“I think,” said Mary slowly now, looking back from her vantage-point on the porch with Mercy in the scented dusk, “that Ninian is right about Mr. Douglas. He probably wouldn't appreciate two politicians in one household. Certainly not if the other one wasn't a Democrat.”

A mosquito whined in her ear, and she swept at it with her fan. It was time to go inside. She gave Mercy a hug and a kiss, and the girls exchanged promises to meet the next day to go downtown to look at ribbons at Birchall's Store. Within the house the hall was dark, though lamps burned in the dining-room where Frances helped Eppy to set the table. Mary ascended the dark stair to her room, Mercy's placid words lingering uncomfortably in her heart.

We can't stay forever in our fathers' houses. . . .

What if Father dies?
She hastily pushed the thought from her mind, turning from it as she'd physically have averted her face.

But the image of him standing in the upstairs hall with Nelson rose out of the shadow, both men covered with dust, the stink of lime and gunpowder hanging heavy in the stuffy heat of the enclosed house and the glowing green ghost of cholera flitting from window to window, just waiting to slip inside.

One day he will die. What then?

Live with Betsey?
Mary shuddered.

With Levi? Or George?

Father will be fine!

But panic whispered to her, nevertheless.
What then? What then? What then?

A letter lay on her dressing-table, its green sealing-wafers cracked across. Of course it was Ninian's right—and Elizabeth's, as her guardians this summer—to read letters that came to her under their roof. But the sight of the opened correspondence filled Mary with the sudden desire to go storming downstairs and inform her sister that she would not stand to be treated like a child.

But until I marry,
she thought furiously,
I
am
only a child in her
household. . . .
Elizabeth certainly read Frances's letters. As Merce's sister-in-law read Merce's.

And there was nowhere but Betsey's house to go back to.

Her hands trembled as she carried the letter to the window, where the last twilight gave enough of a faint blue flush for her to read.

It was from the Reverend John Ward, her old Lexington schoolmaster.

My dear Miss Todd,

I hope this letter finds you in full health and happiness. Often in the years since you left my tutelage I have spoken of you as the best and most promising pupil I have ever had the pleasure and privilege to educate; and frequently my good wife and I have wondered whether, in fact, you might find your calling in the education of the young.

Owing to my wife's illness this summer, she has been unable to assist me as she formerly did, making it necessary for us to seek help in the education of the younger students here at Ward's. Yours was the first name that rose to both of our minds. Your deep love of learning, combined with your affection for small children, impressed us both deeply. I have already spoken to your father and your stepmother concerning the propriety of your returning here to board and to teach. . . .

Mary's hand tightened hard on the paper and she thought,
Oh, I'll just bet Betsey leaped to tell Papa how proper it is, as long as it keeps me out of the house. . . .

But as she sat in the window, looking out into the last of the twilight, she thought again,
We can't stay forever in our fathers' houses.

A schoolmistress.

The thought made her smile. She remembered Madame Mentelle. Maybe an eccentric and happy schoolmistress, who did as she pleased and could stay up all night reading if she wished, and whose letters no one would read without her permission.

One who did not have to live in this desolate and book-less hog-wallow in the midst of the empty prairies, waiting in terror for the next storm.

Still she leaned in the window, her forehead against the glass that was no cooler than the stifling air. A man walked by in the street, a tall skinny silhouette, whistling an old backwoods tune. Darkness settled thick.

After a long time Mary got up, shook her petticoats straight, and went downstairs, to ask Ninian if, when he journeyed to Lexington next month to investigate railroad stocks, she could return with him.

It was time to go home.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Bellevue Place May 1875

“M
RS.
L
INCOLN.
”

A soft tap at the door of her room. John's voice—it was hard for her to think of him as Mr. Wilamet, though he was so grown-up now, with his thin, serious face and his spectacles. They changed so, boys....

Mary pressed her hands to her face, unwilling to think about the boys who would change no more.

“Mrs. Lincoln?”

She didn't even look at the curtained judas on the door, the curtain that could be nudged aside by anyone in the corridor.

“What is it?”

“Your son is here to see you.”

Mary's voice rang hard as flint in her own ears. “I have no son.”

John Wilamet said nothing in reply to that. But he didn't go away. Mary had learned the distinctive creak of the floorboards in the quiet downstairs hall of the family wing, even through the muffling of the Turkey carpets. When she couldn't sleep—as often she couldn't, this past week that she'd been here—it seemed to her sometimes that the comings and goings of Mrs. Patterson and Young Doc shook the house, forcing her to demand paregoric or chloral hydrate to help her drift off. How anyone could be so inconsiderate...

She repeated, raising her voice, “I have no son!”

Still Mr. Wilamet remained. Mary watched the curtain on the door, waiting for it to move, as it did when Gretchen or Mrs. Patterson would peep in on her—believing they were so clever and subtle! But it didn't stir.

She got impatiently to her feet and went to the door, yanked the curtain aside to face the young man through the wooden bars. “Didn't you hear me?”

“I heard you, ma'am.” John still retained the gentle burr of the South that Mary had not heard about her in years. “But the man who's here seems to think he has a mother.”

Mary put a hand to her head; a tear leaked from her eye. She wasn't even sure why she wept—Robert never had any patience with tears. But it had become such a habit with her to weep that she did it almost without thinking. “Get me some paregoric, then, if you will,” she said fretfully. “I have such a headache. If I'm to see him I must be at my best.”

“Of course,” agreed John. “But if I may say so, ma'am—he'll be watching for that.”

“Watching for what?”

“Watching for you to be a little sleepy, the way paregoric makes you. Maybe a little less sharp. More forgetful.”

Mary opened her mouth to snap that paregoric never had that effect on her, but closed it. It
did
make her a little drowsy and more than a little forgetful—so much so that she'd sometimes sit for many hours gazing into the dimness of her hotel-room, and come out of a dream to discover she'd drunk half the bottle without being aware of it. But she'd hoped that no one had noticed.

The thought that Robert would be watching for weakness had never occurred to her. But of course he was a lawyer. He'd watch, as lawyers all watched. And use everything she did and said.

“Just a little, then—water it down. I won't give him that satisfaction. And send Amanda in here to me, so I can change my dress.”

“Good for you, ma'am,” grinned John. “Don't give him a thing.”

As she dressed, Mary's anger rose, sharpened by the sense of restless unhappiness that had so frequently attacked her over the years. In her mind she saw Robert in the courtroom again, tears in his eyes as he announced to the entire world that his own mother was a lunatic.

But when, at last, she entered the parlor and saw him sitting there, physically so like her father, tall and barrel-chested, with wariness in his Todd-blue eyes, her rage overflowed into tears again and she could only sob, “How could you?”

He was on his feet at once, to conduct her to a chair. She jerked her arm away. “Mother, you know you are not well,” he said, in his even, rather light-toned voice. “You know you haven't been well—”

“I haven't been well for twenty-three years!” Mary lashed at him. “You try living with headaches, neuralgia, back pains, and internal complaints for that long and see what it does to
you
! But I am not insane!”

“No one is saying you are
completely
insane, Mother....”

“You are. A week ago, in a public courtroom, you said exactly that!”

“I didn't come here to argue with you.” Robert took her hands, his tone indicated that he didn't want to discuss the matter further—Mary was familiar with that from a lifetime of dealing with her own father. “I came to see how you are feeling. You look more rested than you did, more at peace. How has your week been passed here?”

Mary started to snap back at him that it had been passed in much the fashion anyone would expect, for a woman locked up unjustly by her own family, but she hesitated, his words penetrating past her fury.

How
had
she passed the week here?

And she realized, with a sense of panicked shock that shook her to her core, that she did not exactly know.

It was a realization that took her breath away. It was not that she had been unconscious: she remembered small incidents quite clearly, like the attempt at a séance in the garden with Mrs. Hill, and the carriage-rides—twice? three times?—with Mrs. Patterson and Blanche. But they all came back to her as if part of a cloudy and pleasant dream, without anxiety or pain. She recalled telling Mrs. Bennett—that haunted-eyed old woman with the extraordinary delusion that parts of her body had been taken away and replaced by parts of someone else's—that she had not been so happy or comfortable in her life.

Except when she slept.

She wasn't even sure if her conversation with Mrs. Bennett had been real, or on what day it had taken place.

Was that madness?

“Mother?” Robert was still holding her hands.

“I'm so sorry, dear,” said Mary automatically, and made herself smile. She added, because Robert was looking at her as if she'd begun talking about her tormenting Indian spirit again, “Things go along so quietly here I was just trying to remember what I
have
done all week.” And she laughed, the light sweet conversational laughter of an accomplished belle.

But her heart had begun to pound and her thoughts to race, and she thought,
I must keep his suspicions at bay.

And then,
I can ask Mr. Wilamet. He will know about such things, and he won't betray me.

“I'm delighted to hear it, Mother,” Robert was saying, in the pleased tone of one who has put everything into its proper drawer. “That's precisely why I wanted you to come to Bellevue Place—so that you could rest.”

No,
thought Mary, looking into her son's face and seeing only a stranger's.
You wanted me to come to Bellevue Place so you wouldn't be worried that I'd embarrass you in public. You wanted me to come here so that I wouldn't have to live with YOU. So that you wouldn't have to think about me again, except maybe to say to yourself, “Poor Mama.”

And in her secret heart of hearts, a voice whispered:
You wanted me to come to Bellevue because of what I did to you, all those years ago.

Because of the lie I told.

The lie that had made, and destroyed, his life and hers.

Lexington 1837

M
ARY RETURNED TO
L
EXINGTON IN THE COLD AUTUMN RAIN OF 1837,
jolting up the hill in the stagecoach with Ninian and almost in tears with the pleasure of those craggy familiar hills, the dripping tangled trees. She spent a week at her father's house—which was still hard for her to think of as “home”—sharing the upstairs front bedroom with Ann. Then Nelson loaded her trunks and hatboxes into the carriage and took them over to Ward's school, where she would occupy a room of her own five nights a week for what turned out to be the next twenty-five months.

Ward's school being ten minutes' brisk walk down Main Street and up Market Street, it was seldom that Nelson would bring the carriage, as he had to Mentelle's. Instead Mary would walk—shaded by a ruffled parasol or muffled in a stylish coat of her favorite hunter green—to the big brick house on Main Street every Friday afternoon, and back after Sunday dinner. Under these circumstances she could be pleasant and friendly with Betsey, and have the patience to teach Margaret and Martha—Mattie, they all called her—their sewing-stitches while her stepmother looked after golden-haired little Emilie.

It was good to be back in the South, back in the world whose rules she instinctively knew.

Yet that world had changed, and the subtleness of the changes made the alteration more, not less, disturbing.

There were still the dances in the long room above Giron's Confectionary, and laughter and French gallantries from the little Frenchman who was so delighted to be able to hold conversation in his native tongue. There were plays at Usher's Theater—heaven after three months in the wilds of Springfield!—and danceables at the Meadows and in the big double-parlor at Ashland. There were picnics at race-meetings in the spring, and young men jostling discreetly to sit beside her while the horses galloped down the long green turf, glistening like polished bronze and copper in the sun. There was the wonderful gossip that only Southerners could understand, of vast tangled family trees and acquaintance that went back generations.

But many of the shops in Lexington were closed up now, owing to the collapse of the banks in the wake of President Jackson's economic woes. Girls Mary had known no longer came to the dances, or they came in dresses that bore the mark of discreet refurbishment from last season, and people like Bella Richardson were extra-sweet to them and whispered, “Poor things...” when she thought they didn't hear. Many of Mary's former beaux no longer raced their own horses, and wore a look of grimness, as if they'd grown suddenly old.

Mary Jane Warfield Clay had a son, and was expecting another child soon. Though Mary delighted in little Elisha's soft curls and bright, knowing blue eyes, she found Mary Jane almost wholly preoccupied with servants, high prices, and the household budget. Meg and Mary Wickliffe were likewise both married, and talked exactly like the Yankee women who'd ridden with her on the steamboat down the Ohio, of teething babies and the shocking cost of lamp-oil. When Mary stood at the dances among the single girls, she was disconcerted to realize that some of them were in the upper year or two at Ward's—as she herself had been, when first she'd put up her hair and entered the fascinating world of a belle.

They seemed so
young.
Mary laughed about it with Isabelle Trotter and Julia Warfield, before one of Mr. Clay's sons came over and swept her into a cotillion on his arm. Then for a time she could dimple and laugh and be once again the belle of the ball. But that night, listening to Ann's soft breathing beside her in the dark of the upstairs front bedroom, Mary stared at the ceiling with panic racing in her heart.

Nate Bodley came to call on her, the second or third afternoon after her return from Springfield. “What is it?” he asked, when she stood up and stepped away from his attempt to clasp both her hands, and they both glanced at Betsey, who smiled pointedly and said,

“Well, I'll leave you two young people to get re-acquainted.” She rustled out into the hall, leaving them alone together in the double-parlor. Mary heard her sharp voice call out to Chaney about laying another plate for dinner.

“I've missed you, Mary.” Nate stepped closer, smiling his old devilish smile, and still Mary didn't answer. In her mind she saw the brass head of his cane flying up and down, smelled the mud of the gutter, and the bitter tang of Mr. Presby's blood. “What is it, sweetheart? Now, don't you freeze up on me....”

At that she glanced up at him, her eyes bright with anger. “Do you honestly need to ask that, sir, since Mr. Presby lived here under our roof?” The young tutor had returned to his family's New England home at the same time Mary had gone to Springfield. He had not returned.

Nate's face flushed. Mary wondered whether it was because of guilt over the caning, or because the caning involved the pretty quadroon slave girl he had bought. She wondered too whether that girl was still in Nate's father's household. “That was politics,” he protested. “You gotta understand, Mary, there's things a man can't put up with another man layin' on him.”

A well-bred young lady would have simply said,
Then we can only agree to differ, Mr. Bodley—
with or without shyly downcast eyes—and left it at that. If she really wanted to sever the connection, there were a thousand social ways to avoid Nate without fuss. Mary felt her
own
cheeks flame.

“It was not politics, sir,” she replied in a steady voice. “A righteous man accused you of evil and you had no argument in your favor but violence. That doesn't sound like politics to me.”

“What it doesn't sound like to me is any of your business, begging your pardon, Miss Todd, or any woman's business....”

“It is every right-thinking person's business—”

“It is not!” Nate cut her off, jabbing his finger at her, his eyes blazing with the gunpowder violence that had so frightened her that spring day half a year ago. “I see you've become an abolitionist in the North, talking to people who haven't got the slightest idea what it's like here—”